The Center for Cooperative Media: National Resources for Local Journalism

The Zip episode 13

It’s October 19th, 2016, and today, in our 13th episode, I’m heading back over to the media sector, to learn from with Stefanie Murray and Tim Griggs of Montclair State University’s Local/National News Partnerships Project.

Essentially, Stefanie and Tim are both veteran journalists working with the Center for Cooperative Media at MSU on a program to help large, national media outlets share information with smaller journalism startups, or just smaller publications in general.

The one-year pilot program, funded by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Democracy Fund, seeks to find ways to build lasting and meaningful partnerships between national news organizations and local news publishers, using New Jersey as a primary testing ground.

This interview was recorded about three weeks ago, before I attended MSU’s conference on local journalism, which you’ll hear me refer to during the interview. A little preview here – the conference was amazing. I can’t believe the ticket was only a hundred dollars, because it was worth so much more than that. I met some really interesting people working in the national slash local space, some of whom will be featured on the podcast in coming weeks, so stay tuned for that. They had speakers from NPR, Propublica, Street Fight Magazine, BIA/Kelsey, basically all the big players in local marketing. It was very cool, for a neophyte like me to just sit and absorb the conversations happening in the local journalism and marketing space.

Megan
Hi, Tim and Stefanie, I am really excited and honored to have you both on the podcast today. Here at Zipsprout, I love looking at developments in the local ecosystem and I know recently Montclair started such a development with the Local/National News Partnership Project. So Stefanie, first of all, I love the idea behind the project, that essentially national news organizations, who generally have bigger budgets and more data, will be able to easily share information with local journalists. But can you tell me a bit more how this idea came about, and why Montclair in particular decided to do something about the gap and the space?

Stefanie
Sure. So, the Center for Cooperative Media is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. We work with several generous funders in the journalism space, both
in New Jersey and nationally. One of those funders is the Geraldine R Dodge Foundation, which is based in Morristown, New Jersey.

So we have a great close relationship with the folks at the Dodge Foundation, and Dodge funds a lot of other programs in New Jersey, and also those that are based outside New Jersey, which do work in our state. And one of the programs that the Dodge Foundation also funds in addition to the Center for Cooperative Media is work at ProPublica. And it was actually during a conversation that the folks from Dodge were having with the folks that they fund at ProPublica, when they were talking about different ways that ProPublica could get more of the reporting that they do into the hands of local media outlets. Specifically smaller publishers and smaller broadcast stations that might not know that this information exists from ProPublica, or might not have the capacity to dig it out and localize it themselves. And it was in the course of those conversations that they thought, you know, there is a gap in this space here, and there have been some best practices established by other similar organizations across the country. ProPublica has done work here, the Center for Investigative Reporting has done work here, the Texas Tribune has done work here, and there’s lots of other smaller examples we could cite. They thought this could be a good potential experiment that Dodge could fund that could be bigger than ProPublica.

Those conversations led them to us, because we are one of the organizations they fund and we work with partners across the state of New Jersey. And so that’s how the idea got started. They brought it to us and we took it from there.

Megan
That’s sounds awesome. Do you have any anecdotal examples of ways that – situations that you guys might be able to help – ways that, in the traditional way of doing things, a local journalist or a local news outlet can’t get information, even though it’s available?

Stefanie
Anecdotal – you mean reasons why that is a struggle, or an issue?

Megan
Or yes, organizations you’ve talked to that have had issues with that, or situations in which it’s happening, and you could see that it’s a problem.

Stefanie
I’m trying to think of who would be a good example of that. So, the partners that we specifically work with in New Jersey range from very small, hyper-local publishers that are digital-media focused, on up to broadcast-specific outlets, including public media, including non-profits in the state, and also including larger, what you might call “legacy” news publishers that might have print newspapers, and also have digital properties as well. So we work with a lot. And something that we hear regularly, especially from small publishers in the state, hyper-local publishers, is that they have capacity issues. You know, when you’re a small publisher, you have very limited staff. It’s a struggle sometimes to be able to choose, when you are deciding on what you are going to cover for your audience, and the content, and how much time you have in your day. There’s just capacity issues.

We do hear regularly from some of those smaller publishers that they need help, and they need a very easy way for someone to identify, or help them identify news that would be relevant to their community. And help them figure out how to get it in such a format that’s going to fit into their scheduling and their lives, and so that’s something that we hear regularly. And on the flip side, we see that there’s a lot of really great national reporting happening from different organizations that we think could help with that capacity issue, and help provide some help for smaller organizations. I don’t know if I’m really answering your question directly, but I’m just explaining a little bit more about what we’ve heard from partners.

Megan
Yeah, no, that’s cool. So Tim, I know you’ve done your fair share of work for national publications, like the New York Times. But then, also, the Texas Tribune, which is more locally focused. So first of all, I’d love to know what it is about local journalism that pulled you in, and maybe away from a more national outlet. And then, did you find when working with the Texas Tribune that there were times you wanted to write stories on national trends, but didn’t really have access to the resources that you needed?

Tim
Yes, so my interest in local goes back to the start of my career. As I think you know, I spent a long time in local journalism as the editor of a newspaper in North Carolina, where you’re based right now. To me, it’s a great way to sort of make a big mark on a community in sort of an instant way. When you write for a local publication or broadcast on radio or television or whatever it is, you immediately see the impact of your work. There’s something really powerful about that. So I’ve always been drawn to local in that way.

To give an example of what you were speaking about before, when I was the editor of a small-market newspaper, we still had a slot editor or a national news editor, whose role was to look at what’s coming across the wires, and send them over to the Metro desk to localize. In a lot of newspapers, that role has gone away. There is just this major capacity issue when you’re a local news provider to even know what’s available to you. Even something as simple as just republishing what’s already out there, let alone localizing it.

So I’ve always been drawn to local journalism. There’s something really compelling about the impact you can have at a place like the New York Times. But I think the sort of joy that you get out of making a difference, and the reason a lot of us go into journalism in the first place, really happens at the local level.

In terms of my experience at the Tribune, and access to national resources, I think we did a really interesting job there of partnering with national news organizations for that very reason. We had a partnership with the New York Times; I was on the other end of that equation, to help get stories about the state of Texas, particularly politics and policy, in front of a national audience; and then do the same thing with The Washington Post. To have access to Post TV, their video channel, we housed a reporter in their news room, we did shared events together. So there’s a lot of sort of win/wins between national news organizations and locals.

Megan
Yeah, and I think it’s pretty interesting what you’re talking about, that it’s actually someone’s job to look at the wire and then localize it, when …

Tim
(laughing) It is less so now.

Megan
Yeah, but it seems like even that is a one-way thing. I’ve been talking to some other local journalists about how some of the best ways to really do quality local journalism is to take a local story and then to look at the bigger trend involved in it. So in other ways, there might be people looking at the rising prices of homes in a particular neighborhood, or they might see something that’s happening in their neighborhood, and it might be part of a national trend. And they might not have the resources to do that investigation on their own.

Tim
Yes, exactly. Yes, Stefanie and I have been talking about this on sort of three levels. The first level is just being aware as a local news provider of what’s available nationally, in terms of reporting that’s already out there, data sets that are already out there – and literally just republishing them.

The second layer would be contextualizing or localizing – basically, the example that you just gave. Looking at national data, or national stories, or national trends and then putting them into local context for your audience.
And then the third layer – the hardest to get to, I think – are outright, established partnerships; where Partner A and local Partner B get together and have some kind of ongoing relationship. So the point of this project is to try to get some successes on all three of those levels, if we can. And figure out how to document the process of doing that and make it as replicable as possible.

Megan
So what would be an example of a perfect partnership? Like the New York Times partnering with some local organization in some part of the country. Can it really be any two entities, like one big and one small, or do you have ideas of “Oh, these two could really work well together, because they talk about similar things” – like topical?

Tim
We don’t know where we’ll go; it could take lots of forms, and it probably will take, and should take lots of different forms. One that I think is pretty interesting is the potential relationship between national, single-subject news organizations, like InsideClimate News on environment issues, the Marshall Project on criminal justice, (could not make out name of organization) on public education. These are national news organizations, in a sense, who are really focusing on one subject, but certainly have an interest in reaching as broad an audience as possible. And local news organizations that almost always cover those issues, but don’t maybe have access to national data or maybe some media storytelling capabilities. So you can sort of see some synergies there. That’s just one example of literally an infinite number of possibilities.

Megan
Yeah, I like that, because maybe they’d be able to help each other. Because the local organization probably has a lot of data on their local environmental issues that they can then share with an organization that wants that from everywhere. So, that’s really cool.

So, Montclair is also hosting a conference on local journalism in a couple of weeks, called “Sustain Local”. So when I saw that I thought, “I have to go to this,” and I’m actually going, and I’m really excited about it. So can you tell me a little bit about the conference, and then also, I’m really interested in why you chose the name “Sustain”, because it almost means there needs to be an effort to sustain local. What is the idea behind that for a journalism conference?

Stefanie
So this is the third national conference for the Center for Cooperative Media, the third conference that we’ve put on. The first one was about engagement, and it was called “Engage Local.” The second one was about innovation, and it was called “Innovate Local”. And now we’re at “Sustain Local”. So our focus is on supporting local journalism, specifically in the state of New Jersey, and we think to do that, it takes a village. It takes cooperation and collaboration, so that’s what our focus is on.

The reason we are at “sustain” now for the third conference is that one of the main issues that so many of our publishers deal with, and publishers across the industry are dealing with, is developing business models and diversified streams of revenue, so we can pay to do great journalism. It’s as simple as that.

And so sustainability is obviously a really big topic in our industry right now, and specifically we want to put a focus on sustainability for local media. So often we hear about really great ideas being tried by national news outlets. And outlets that have scale – like the (could not understand) of the world, New York Times, (could not understand), the broadcast networks, even public media to some extent. But we really wanted to have a specific conversation about local media. Which a lot of times means smaller, and a lot of times means geographically bound, and many times means – you know, a lot of our organizations have not have the opportunity, or have not had the bandwidth yet, to experiment with some of the more creative methods of diversifying revenue that some of the larger organizations have. And so we thought it was very important to put a focus on local media, and specifically talk about revenue supporting local media.

And it’s been very difficult to build the schedule for this conference, because there’s so much experimentation going on in this part of our industry right now, and a lot of things are very new and it’s in the early stages. So it was difficult to build the speaker schedule for the conference. We tried to be as thoughtful as possible on who we’re bringing in, but really, most of the panels have a very specific revenue focus on that side of sustainability. Because when we looked at the issue of sustainability, you can also talk about engagement, and reasons why you need to be very deeply involved with your community, and tied well to your community, to be sustainable long-term as a local media organization.

We had some folks who wanted us to talk more about how we can achieve personal sustainability, especially for small publishers who are stretched very thin – how could they better organize their businesses to help themselves be sustainable long-term? But we really chose to keep the folks on revenue.

Megan
Yeah, and I think that’s so interesting, and that’s why I perused it. I thought, “This is right up my alley,” because the idea for revenue generation can tie back into working with business sponsors, whether it’s through native advertising or traditional ads. And I was thinking, too, about a lot of the ways that larger organizations like the New York Times, for example, are trying paywells and just different revenue generation models. Do you guys have thoughts – it might be a really big question, but are there other revenue generation models that we might soon see? Or are there some that seem to be working versus not working – I guess, from the ones I know of, which are paywells, advertising, regular banner ads, or print ads, and sponsorships?

Tim
Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on this and could spend all day. I’ll try not to bore you – I think there is a lot of great experimentation happening here, but ultimately, what I think seems to be working right now are consumer revenue models. You mentioned paywells, but there are tons of other types of ways to generate revenue. Crop funding is an example of a type of consumer revenue, membership, of course, is an example, micro transactions even are an example. So that’s a whole category of revenue.

I think, particularly at the local level, events make a ton of sense – you know, being able to connect people to great programming, and to each other. That second part is really important – which, of course, you can monetize in a lot of different ways – through sponsorship, through consumer support, like ticket sales, through merchandise. That’s an interesting one, in my view.

Philanthropic support, I think, is really interesting, whether you are a for-profit or a non-profit. In terms of foundations, and major wealthy individuals. That, of course, gives you a lot of ways to montetize under the heading of “philanthropy.”

And then, of course, funding from business. You mentioned sponsorship in advertising, but there’s marketing services, editorial services – there are a lot of different ways to monetize businesses. And I think organizations, particularly local organizations that have figured out that it’s not healthy for any business to have its revenue tied to one category – those organizations are doing well, not just because of growth in any one particular area. But from a journalism perspective, that kind of revenue diversification protects you against influence. If all of your revenue comes from a single advertiser, or a single advertising category, for example, you’re much more likely to be influenced by that category. Not to mention there’s a great deal of market risk. Newspapers had a lot of revenue tied to classifieds; and then classifieds got eaten alive by Craig’s List, and auto sites, and real estate sites, and so on. And that really hastened the shrinking of local newspapers. So I think the lesson is that there is a lot of success happening out there in small doses, and to Stefanie’s earlier point, being able to figure out where you place your bets and prioritize that experimentation is really key.

Megan
Yeah. And actually, that’s a really good point, on diversifying. I think, for a local outlet – do you find that it’s hard to diversify? Because some of them are just trying to get up and running and get one revenue generation model. And to have three or four –

Tim
Yes, at the Texas Tribune, Neiman Lab once called us the poster child for revenue diversity, because we had, very roughly speaking, like 20% of revenue came from five different categories. It’s very hard to do. It’s hard for a bunch of reasons. One, you need to invest in those revenue streams. And of course it takes money to make money, so making decisions about that is tough. Choosing how to prioritize among them is really tricky. And also, some of them have a long ramp-up time. So speaking of consumer revenue, typically you don’t just turn it up and money starts flowing in. It can take a long time to build up a revenue stream.

Megan
Yeah, and I can see how that could be hard.

On the flip side, if you’re a brand who might want to work with local journalists or find native advertising opportunities in maybe more hyper-local organizations, how do you find them? I’ve found a few listings, such as “Michelle’s List”, which lists some local news journalism outlets. But is there one key area that you can go to to find a lot of local news organizations?

Tim
I can take this, Stefanie, and I know you know a lot about this, too.

If you’re a business – typically it doesn’t work that way; it works the other way. Your organization needs to be actively pursuing brands. Long gone are the days where at the local newspaper, you just wait for the phone to ring and take an ad insertion order. So typically it doesn’t work that way. Instead you have really smart sponsorship or advertising or underwriting sales people who understand that what they’re selling is very different from other types of advertising or marketing. You are selling – in a lot of cases, particularly at the very local level – you are selling (could not understand) as opposed to selling space. It’s just a different mindset. So that can be a challenge for local news organizations, to find people who are gifted sales people.

But in terms of resources, Michelle’s List is a great example – that’s a listing of news organizations. There are organizations that support the local media scene, in addition to, obviously, the Center for Cooperative Media. There’s LION, which is the local independent online news group. There’s INN, which –

Stefanie
There’s the LION Conference this week, too.

Megan
The LION Conference?

Stefanie
Yes, it’s this Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Tim
So those are a couple of examples of places that have a membership that’s based entirely on local news organizations.

Stefanie
I would say that, like Tim said, at CCM, we work primarily in the state of New Jersey. LION is nation-wide at about 135 members. The LION Publisher’s organization, and I accidentally interrupted him there, he’s talking about INN, which is also a great membership organization that networks with a lot of the smaller local media publishers you mentioned who are non-profit. I would also look at the local media association group – that’s another organization that’s a trade organization in this space.

Megan
Cool, yeah.

Tim, I totally understand your saying that for the most part it’s probably not the case that the phone rings and it’s a brand who wants to spend thousands of dollars with the organization. Actually, with Zipsprout, what I’m doing is encouraging businesses, because actually, lots of larger businesses want local marketing and kind of one of the areas I suggest people go to is local journalists. Because finding people who can really write and talk about a particular area can be a really great way to partner your brand, if you’re looking for customers in that area. Hopefully I can work to have more of those phones ringing …

Tim
We could use every bit of help it can get.

Megan
So, slight change of topic, but I think kind of along the same lines … I feel like I’ve noticed as I’ve talked to local journalists for this podcast, and as I’ve done my own research that, to me, it almost seems like there’s a renaissance of local journalism. And I guess what I mean by this is, if you think about what local news meant to most people ten or fifteen years ago, or still, maybe, people today, it’s kind of like, “Live at six o’clock! People were murdered in downtown today!” It’s very much about the worst kind of things that are happening locally, and more about ratings, and I guess it’s more television local news or something.

I guess what I’m noticing is that a lot of local media outlets that are maybe a bit more on the fringes are starting to do more New Yorker-style, almost, long-form journalism. And those sorts of organizations are on the rise. Do you guys feel like that’s a new trend, or is that something maybe that I’m just noticing, or do you see those two issues as being distinct from one another?

Tim
I can – I’ll start, and Stefanie, jump in. My take on that would be that there’s more fragmentation in local media than there’s ever been before, in terms of more types of local journalism. There’s organizations that are smaller, that attempt to fill the gaps that were created by the decimation of local news, and they take all kinds of forms. Including podcasts, by the way. But all kinds of different organizations are popping up. I definitely have not seen explosion in local long form, although, after this, I would love to hear the examples that you were talking about.

I think there’s definitely experimentation happening in different types of local journalism – you know, listings and emailed newsletters and so on.

Stefanie
Yeah, I would agree with Tim. I think what we’ve seen, and I think it’s been fairly well-documented – he described it as a fragmentation in local media, and that’s exactly what we see here at the CCM in New Jersey, and part of the reason we exist is because – well, I hate the word “traditional”, but the media environment in the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s was very different than it is now. Today we see, in some areas, there are more news outlets. We’ve counted in our most recent census of news organizations in the state of New Jersey, more than 850 different news and information-providing organizations in our state. But many of them are startups, many of them are smaller, a lot of them have very specific focuses. Many of them are run by folks who have a non-traditional media background.

So consumers today get their news in all sorts of very different ways – for consumers who are getting a lot of their content via social media feeds, or other algorithm-based, and non-traditional media curated models, it’s a very fragmented landscape. So I would say that that’s what we’re dealing with in local media, right now, and especially here. And I wouldn’t say that a lot of our local organizations, I don’t see a lot of in-depth long form coming out of the organizations here, not that they don’t aspire to that, but that’s not something we see regularly.

Megan
Yeah. I definitely will say, and my experience may be more anecdotal based on some of the organizations I’ve talked to here in the triangle area of North Carolina – I’ve talked to a few local publishers who are kind of working to, either do long form, or just kind of create stories that are not so much news oriented, but more I guess non-fiction local storytelling oriented. I can definitely see how the system is more fragmented, as well.

Stefanie
I think actually, to your point, one of the opportunities for local journalists and local media, is that, once you don’t have the weight any more of supporting a traditional or legacy news organization on your shoulders, and you decide what you do. Deciding what you’re going to do for your community, deciding what you’re going to focus on, can be freeing, in a lot of ways. That’s something that we see some of our smaller publishers, especially in the state, have decided to focus on this specific area of coverage, or have decided that their community is most interested in local lifestyle news, and they will focus on that. So we definitely see a lot of niche news entrepreneurs, here in our state.

Megan
Cool, I kind of like seeing those, so I hope that continues to grow, too.

So, final question for both of you … What journalist or writer or maybe just general person you think is smart would you love to have lunch with and kind of pick their brain?

Stefanie
Well, I was going to say Tim Griggs, but …

Megan
Well, hopefully you’ve already had lunch at some point!

Stefanie
Once, yeah.

Tim
That is so disappointing. Oh man, what a letdown. So who would you say?

Stefanie
You know, that’s an interesting question, and I saw, Megan, that you were going to ask that. To be honest, and I think Tim understands this too, we are very lucky in the media business. We are both at the point in our careers that we can call up a lot of people in our industry and get them on the phone or have lunch with them. So I’ve been really lucky to actually meet a lot of the people who I would put on this list – if not to sit down and have lunch, at least to have some short conversations with. One of the people I’ve always found really fascinating – this is probably a stock answer – but I just think she’s really interesting and has had a great career, is Christiane Amanpour, who is now with ABC, right? Used to be with CNN. I just think that her career, especially international reporting, has always been really fascinating. And she doesn’t really relate to what we’re talking about here, sustainability. But she’s just had a lot of cool experiences, and so I’d love to hear more about that.

Megan
Cool, yeah. Tim, what about you?

Tim
Well, I have many, although like Stefanie, I feel like I have been fortunate to have met many of the people that I would want to talk to. I’ll give you two sets of people. One would be Alec Baldwin and Marc Maron. That is a non-traditional journalism answer, I know, and I bet you neither of them would consider themselves journalists.

Megan
Especially not Alec Baldwin…

Tim
What they both do is really journalism, in my view. They do this amazing audio-based profile reporting. You know, Alec Baldwin’s “Here’s the Thing” on WNYC, and Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. And they are both incredible interviewers in totally different ways. And I just feel that there’s a lot someone can learn from that type of storytelling, even if it’s not, strictly speaking, journalism.

The other two that come to mind, just because I am such a rabid fan of theirs but I’ve never met them, are Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin at “The Skimm”. Which is, to me, one of the best news products out there. What I find fascinating about them – and by the way, today there was an announcement that they got some additional seed funding from the New York Times. They’re trying to build something that’s really unique, and it’s almost entirely based on this incredible tone that they’ve developed. If your listeners aren’t reading “The Skimm” every day, they should be, whether they’re millennial women or not. It’s one of the best reads every day. So yeah, I think lunch with them would be pretty fascinating.

Megan
Yeah, it would be. To your point about interviewers – now that you’ve mentioned them, I do agree, because I think one of mine would be Terry Gross. Because there’s something about a really good interviewer that you’re just like, “Oh, man. I want to talk to you.”

Tim
Yeah. Exactly.

Megan
Well cool, Stefanie and Tim, thank you guys so much for being on the podcast today. I really appreciate both of your time. And I’m very much looking forward to going to the conference, and meeting some more local journalists, and talking to people.